Deeplinks Blog posts about Export Controls

Email. Online banking. Facebook. Your doctor’s office. These are all places where we rely on encryption to keep the private details of our lives safe. Without encryption, none of these services would be remotely safe to use, and even with encryption breaches are too common. We all want the digital world to be safer, not less secure. That’s why EFF joined the nearly 150 privacy and human rights organizations, technology companies and trade associations, and individual security and policy experts who sent a letter urging President Obama to

One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a Berkeley mathematics Ph.D. student, who wished to publish an encryption algorithm he developed, the source code for a program to run the algorithm, and a mathematical paper describing and explaining the algorithm.

It’s looking like we might be on the brink of another crypto war. The first one, in the 90s, was a misguided attempt to limit the public’s access to strong, secure cryptography. And since then, the reasons we need the good security provided by strong crypto have only multiplied. That’s why EFF has joined 20 civil society organizations and companies in sending a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to “re-emphasize the importance of creating a process for establishing secure and resilient encryption standards, free from back doors or other known vulnerabilities.”

Update 9/26/14: Recently Apple has announced that it is providing basic encryption on mobile devices that they cannot bypass, even in response to a request from law enforcement. Google has promised to take similar steps in the near future. Predictably, law enforcement has responded with howls of alarm.

It’s no secret that EFF is strongly opposed to the United States’ piecemeal approach to updating sanction provisions for the five U.S.-embargoed countries of Sudan, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. We’ve noted that the fundamental problem with the United States’ reform method is that it’s “largely reactionary and ultimately prioritizes certain countries over others for reasons that are, to put it charitably, hard to discern.” For example, according to an article published by the Open Technology Institute, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued Iran a new General License D-1—which replaces the old General License D—making it acceptable for U.S.